The Neo-Nazis of the Daily Stormer Wander the Digital Wilderness

The neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer has been kicked off a number of the Web’s domain registrars, but it keeps finding people to help it get back on its feet.

Photograph by Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Since this past August, the Daily Stormer, a prime hub for neo-Nazism on
the Web, has found itself in a peculiar kind of digital exile. Its
journey began in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally, in
Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a young woman named Heather Heyer
was murdered by a man who drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist
protesters. The following day, Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s
founder, published an article about Heyer titled “Woman Killed in Road
Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” Hours later,
GoDaddy, one of the Web’s largest domain registrars, announced that it
was cancelling the Daily Stormer’s service. Several other U.S.-based
companies, including Google, Namecheap, and Cloudflare, soon followed
suit.

In the ensuing four months, the site bounced around the world, with
brief stays at top-level domains representing various countries—.ru
(Russia), .al (Albania), .at (Austria), .is (Iceland), .ws (Western
Samoa). During the tumultuous period surrounding 2017’s independence
referendum in Catalonia, the Daily Stormer took advantage of a .cat
domain; five days later, the site was banished to obscurity once again,
eventually resurfacing at a .ai domain, in Anguilla. Then, last month,
the neo-Nazis apparently found their promised land. After being ousted
from its .hk domain by the Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation,
the site resurfaced at a new, non-geographical domain: .red.

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I took some satisfaction
from the irony—a site with a section dedicated to the “Jewish Problem,”
condemned to wander the wilderness, driven out of one country after
another. I set out to discover how the Web’s most virulent anti-Semites
kept getting back on their feet. Who were the domain registrars, content
hosts, and other providers working to keep the Daily Stormer online?
Were they Nazi sympathizers themselves? Free-speech absolutists? Or just
in it for the money? And what rationalization could they offer for
supporting a publication that has declared me and my family subhuman—if,
indeed, they knew what they were doing at all? As I began my search, I
was quickly plunged into a dizzying new world of proxy servers, shadowy
data centers, and matryoshka-like holding companies—the means by which
hate metastasizes on the Internet.

Anglin founded the Daily Stormer in 2013, naming it for Hitler’s
favorite tabloid, Der Stürmer. The site has consistently aimed to draw
in younger audiences, those perhaps merely exploring the concept of
white supremacy. A recently leaked style
guide makes the publication’s aesthetic goals and ethos explicit. “The reader
is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly
awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points,” Anglin
writes. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking
or not.” Later, he adds, “This is obviously a ploy and I do want to gas
kikes.” (Neither Anglin nor Andrew Auernheimer, who has long served as
the Daily Stormer’s Web master, responded to requests for comment.) Some
of the site’s readers have taken its missives in deadly earnest,
including Dylann Roof, who fatally shot nine black churchgoers in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; James Harris Jackson, who is
accused of using a sword to murder a black man in New York City, last
spring; and William Atchison, who killed two high-school students in New
Mexico, a month ago.

Although the Daily Stormer’s ideological project was clear, I soon found
its technical underpinnings to be frustratingly opaque. A cursory search
revealed its domain registrar to be GKG, a firm based in Texas. Like
GoDaddy, GKG serves as a kind of switchboard, linking a site’s URL (used
by humans) with a corresponding numeric I.P. address (used by
computers). When I asked the company’s representatives for comment about
their genocidal guests, they replied curtly. “While GKG does NOT endorse
the beliefs or content on the site, the registrant has not broken any
laws or violated our terms of service,” Michael Mahoney, of the
company’s abuse team, told me. (Those terms of service contain a clause
prohibiting “blatant expressions of bigotry, racism, or hatred.” Recent
headlines from the Daily Stormer: “Synagogue Honors Jewish Murderers and
Pimps for Hanukkah”; “Black Ape Robs 74-Year-Old White Woman on an
Elevator.”) Mahoney continued, “In cases where laws are clearly being
violated, we can act accordingly. Those that are not so clear are
reserved for the US Court to decide.”

I was already at the limit of my technical knowledge, so I turned to
Yonatan Zunger, a former Google engineer, for advice. With his help, I
found the Daily Stormer’s I.P. address, which turned out to be
registered to a Canadian company called Frantech Solutions. It was here
that I encountered Francisco Dias, the founder of Frantech and two
affiliated companies, BuyVM and Buyshared. (A portrait of Dias on
BuyVM’s Web site shows him looking pensive at a black-tie event, elbows
inches from a mostly eaten slice of chocolate cake.) Through his
companies, Dias rents out server space in Las Vegas, New Jersey, and
Luxembourg—the last of which, according to BuyVM’s
site, offers especially “strong privacy
and freedom of speech laws.” When I contacted Dias to ask him about his
involvement with the Daily Stormer, he replied at some length. “I try my
very best to take the most neutral stance when it comes to things like
this,” he wrote. “I’d prefer they weren’t hosted here, but minus some
people trying to sling bad press at me, they’ve broken no laws I’m aware
of.”

This wasn’t the first controversial Web site that Dias had abetted. Last
year, on the Daily Kos, Margaret Pless called him
out for hosting an infamous cyberbullying hub called Kiwi Farms, which, as
she noted in a separate article for New
York,
“specializes in harassing people they perceive as being mentally ill or
sexually deviant in some way.” The site has been associated with at
least one target’s suicide. Pless told me that she had attempted to
contact Dias multiple times without receiving a response. Later, though,
Kiwi Farms apparently switched providers, quietly vacating Frantech’s
servers.

At the time I first got in touch with Dias, BuyVM’s terms of service
prohibited “Any content that violates Canadian, United States, and
Luxembourg laws.” Since Canada has a law explicitly forbidding the
promotion or advocacy of genocide, I pointed Dias to a recent Daily
Stormer article that called Slobodan Praljak, a former general in the
Croatian Army who was convicted of war crimes against Bosnia’s Muslim
population, a hero; the article also compares the murder of thousands of
Muslims to “spraying termites.” Dias said that he hadn’t heard from
Canadian law enforcement, though he was “sure” people had reached out to
them about it. (BuyVM’s terms of
service have since been updated to
indicate that the company does its best “to follow a Law of the Land
stance when it comes to content hosted within our services”—without
specifying any particular law or land.) Moreover, Dias contended, he
only provided the site with bandwidth; someone else hosted the data. But
who?

In Dias’s initial correspondence, he had directed me to another company,
BitMitigate, which provides the Daily Stormer with protection against
cyberattacks. In August, BitMitigate’s twenty-year-old founder, Nick
Lim, posted a
statement defending his decision to work with the Daily Stormer, appealing to the
Founding Fathers and “the right to freedom of expression enshrined
within our constitution.” (In an interview that month, Lim provided
another rationale, telling
ProPublica,
“I thought it would really get my service out there.”) When I contacted
Lim, he provided one more layer of protection to the site: he refused to
disclose who hosted the Stormer’s data, citing “user privacy and
security.” Stressing that he himself did not provide it, he wished me
the best.

At this point, despite Zunger’s guidance, I began to feel as if I were
playing a confusing, exhausting shell game, rife with terms I’d never
encountered before. I’d been rebuffed, then pointed toward the law and
the police—in Canada and in the United States—by two different
companies, and toward the Constitution by a third. The tech-bro rhetoric
of freedom rang in my ears like an ugly bell. All this to protect a site
that calls the N.F.L. the “Negro Felon League” and called the stabbing
of a Jewish citizen of Jerusalem “the beginning of the party.”

It’s difficult, at best, to reconcile this abhorrent rhetoric with the
high-handed language—of neutrality, of freedom—that is used to defend
it. Moreover, appeals to “the law of the land,” which Dias made
repeatedly, are somewhat undercut by the fact that one country’s
residents can engage in digital activities across borders, in lands with
different laws; it’s hard not to feel that actors like Dias use the
authorities as a shield for impropriety. And, after chasing the Daily
Stormer as far as I could go, I was left with a troubling question: Who,
in the face of open neo-Nazism, wants to “stay neutral”? And is enabling
this type of rhetoric, and perhaps inspiring further real-life violence,
all that neutral after all?